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shame, but I now tend to see my long-ago self there as a wan and wary child, subject to a smaller spatial scale than everything about me, a downy white cheek fronting the gloss of an opulent Brobdingnag. When I awoke on the first morning, a shrivelled grub in the corner of someone else’s bed, I remember thrillingas if for the first time to all the dazzled self-pity of childhood; I felt that the reduced outlines of my body (the poor thighs, the poor arms, the poor shoulders) expressed an almost abrasive pathos — much too much to bear (I could bear it, just about; I had some bottle then. I can’t bear it now). My eyes stayed shut. I didn’t dare move — and sensed also that this was an intelligible procedure. The contours of the blankets I lay in: that was all there was of my space.
    Mrs Daltrey entered the room with Dickensian bustle, carrying the whole world in her wake, threw back the curtains to a rush of sun, and told me to get dressed. As I obeyed she limped round the room singing forcefully and arranging my clothes in a vacated drawer. Groomed to her satisfaction, I was taken out of the door, along a passage, down a staircase much smaller than the one we had come up by, through the kitchen, into a vivid conservatory where four people sat round a crowded tabletop.
    ‘Now this is your sister, Miss Ursula,’ said Mrs Daltrey, gesturing towards the girl, soft and sleepier in white, who smiled, ‘and this is Mister Gregory’ — that dark, thin-faced boy who turned and gazed at me with stolen eyes.
    So this is how the days start.
    My big cheap alarm clock, invariably set for 7.55, is placed on the window-sill at the far end of my room. When I sleep at all — as opposed to simply lying in bed all night, gagging and flashing with booze and nerves — I do so with a cloying, musty, vascular heaviness (I die a little), and if the clock is positioned within my reach I’ll just lean over, slap off the alarm and burrow back into unconsciousness. This used to happen so often, and used to make me feel so incredibly insecure at work, that I took to placing the tinny round bomb under the cocked lid of my record-player (for extra resonance) with nastily worded notes by it saying things like FUCKING GET UP or GET UP, YOU FUCK , necessitating a hot-eyed stumble across the room; usually, though, I would merely stumble back to bed again, to rise clogged and guilty at 10. For an experimental period I fell into the habit of placing various obstacles in my path, obstacles intended to jolt and scare me awake with sudden noise and stubbed pain, only to weave obliviously through the tripwires, angled chairs and upended wastepaper-baskets, press the clock’s quivering nipple, and weavingly return to the moist warmth of the sheets. I hate sleep, anyway (and wish to Christ I didn’t dream so much). I don’t know why I still bother with the stuff. Anything can happen when you’re asleep. Sleep just pulls the wool over your eyes.
    Now I get out of bed as if someone were trying to keep me there, and stand all shocked and
tonto
before the gingerly opened window. It takes cold air, will and time. It takes, for instance, at least a minute of gentle panting and gasped obscenities before I am able to storm the bathroom (via the little dressing-room in between, where Gregory’s clothes hang on the walls like mosaics) and get to work on reclaiming my face. Before they are prepared to open, my eyes demand ninety seconds with a wet sponge, and a further gook-rinse with plain water until such time as they regain their rather suspect cheer (I get lots of sleepy, even when I don’t sleep. To look at the basin, you’d think I had spent a day at the seaside). Then, too, my mouth will put up with no less than three minutes of brush and gargle if its dry paving of dust is ever to retreat, my nose a furlong of lavatory paper if the airways are ever to open. The corralling of my face lifts the seven veils of the daily hangover (why do I drink so much